


Coming home

by Pariwhoop



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Narnia, Susan Pevensie - Freeform, The Last Battle, end of book 7, susan comes home, susan pevensie redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 20:44:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16541900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pariwhoop/pseuds/Pariwhoop
Summary: They'd gone, one bright summer day, they'd just gone been lost between one afternoon and the next. One day she'd had a life and the next day it had shattered. She would always remember the phone call she'd got though she could never remember what had been said that day, she could see parts of it, the afternoon sunlight shining through her tiny flat tucked away in the middle of the city, a pigeon taking flight from her balcony, the chipped polish on her nails that she had been meaning to redo, the newspaper she'd been holding dropping to the floor.She remembered too much and yet too little.





	Coming home

She had been left behind.

They'd gone, one bright summer day, they'd just gone been lost between one afternoon and the next. One day she'd had a life and the next day it had shattered. She would always remember the phone call she'd got though she could never remember what had been said that day, she could see parts of it, the afternoon sunlight shining through her tiny flat tucked away in the middle of the city, a pigeon taking flight from her balcony, the chipped polish on her nails that she had been meaning to redo, the newspaper she'd been holding dropping to the floor.

She remembered too much and yet too little.

She remembered Peter calling her before they'd gone to the train station, pleading, one last time, to come talk about Narnia. To come believe in it again.  
She wished she'd gone just so she wouldn't be so alone in the world without her brothers and her sister, her dear, dear sister, little Lucy, Eustace, who'd been much better after Narnia, Jill, who'd been nice, who'd been a dryad child in a world of railways and concrete and night shifts.  
She remembered why she hadn't gone.

She remembered the dream, a fair Narnian king calling to her, calling her home, asking for help.  
Then she remembered talking to Aslan, that one final time, when he told them that Narnia would be closed to her forevermore.   
It had pained so much to leave the first time. She missed its colours, the reality of everything there. The brightness of the fabrics, the red of the apples.

The first lipstick she'd ever bought had been that shade of Narnian apple that she thought she'd forgotten.

And she missed it all. She missed it all it even hurt to think of just getting together to talk about Narnia.  
Yes, she was starting to forget. But she hadn't really changed. Her siblings had merely been unable to see that her nylons were velvet dresses lined with brocade and lace and gold and though her skirts were shorter than they'd ever been in Narnia, they were her armor. She tried her hardest to forget what Narnia had meant to her, because it pained her too much. What all her friends there had meant to her. Because she had been told she was not to come back.

She never forgot all of it.

She avoided talking about it, tried to keep her brothers and sister from bringing it up. She tried her hardest to grow up, just as Aslan had always asked her to.

Lucy had grown fluffy, full of kindness, changed by her time on the Dawn Treader.  
Susan had grown hard, a shell full of poison and brittle as ice. She'd been given something, something she was responsible for, a country, a crown and she'd grown under its mantle in golden, gay, Narnia. And then she was told it was not for her.

She would start again if she needed to.

She'd make herself do better, lead better in a different world, a different war.  
She tried to make the best of what she had. When she heard of the movement in America for Women's Rights, she went there and protested along with them. She studied Science in a time where women were frowned upon, and she led the Science and Research Division for a secret agency whose name would be forgotten by history during the war.  
She tried to lead as best as a queen she could.

But she never truly forgot home. She forgot most of it, but she never forgot the light shining through the leaves and the iron lamp and the smell of Narnian Apples. She forgot the songs they played, the fauns at springtime, but she never forgot the feel of feel of forest ground beneath her feet or the taste of hot chocolate on her tongue in wintertime. She forgot the tales of the bards but forever remembered Radagast the donkey. She forgot the twists of Cair Paravel but never forgot the sea that was seen from its towers.  
She forgot the constellations, their names, but she did not forget the feeling of wonder when she first saw those star strewn skies. So different from the smog of the world she'd been born in.

And she found her way home, in the end. She found her way home when it was her time, when she was sixty five and had a lined face and grey hair and was recognised as a Queen by everyone who saw her.   
That was what they had started calling her, the papers, The Queen of the Civil Rights movement.

And she still bought that particular shade of Red Narnian Apple Lipstick.

When it happened she saw a light, a tug, a warm glow in the darkness.  
She saw her siblings playing around the garden, dear Reepicheep and Caspian and the beginning of a story that she was to write from now on. And she saw that she was home, forever more.  
She looked at the light, the future for her written in the darkness, but she paused, for a minute, and remembered the life she'd tried to live.  
She turned to see Aslan beside her.  
"Hello, child," he said, merely. Two words she realised, that she had been waiting to hear for years.  
The tears tracked down her cheeks as she realised she would not be alone again. She'd found her family again.

"It takes longer, for some, you know." Aslan added, in his velvet soft voice. "It takes longer for some and you needed to grow. You deserved to grow. There were people in your world that needed you."

"I know," she said hoarsely.

"Your siblings never tried to start again, as I had asked them to. To live life in their world, to grow up. They weren't able to."

She said the Unspoken, "I was."

"Yes, child," said Aslan, so sadly that she turned to look at him again. There were great lion tears in his beautiful eyes, tears in the golden glow of the garden and she sat in front of him, and laced her fingers through the soft mane of the lion. She remembered this, this feeling, of warmth and light, soft fur through her fingers.

She saw the tears for her pain, and she realised when she saw Aslan crying that she would not have been happy in the garden when she was young. It had never been about the nylons and the lipsticks. She'd always wanted to be something, do something, change something. She'd been Ambitious, in a time where it was a crime for a woman to aspire to do, to be.   
So she had done. She had been.

She saw her painful journey and realised she was proud of it. She'd been a Queen to those that she could, and tried her best to change the world for something better. She'd lived her life, not alone, she realised, she had been surrounded by people who had been better for all that she'd been there. She realised the pain was her journey was, and though none other may understand that, not Peter, nor Lucy, but that was okay.

She'd lived her life and journey and said goodbye to the Susan Pevensie, scientist and activist and a woman who was herself in a world where women were not allowed to be who they were. She realised that this was all she had ever needed.

And then it was time to go home, so she walked down the tunnel, to the garden.


End file.
